Breedr raises £2M led by LocalGlobe for its livestock data and trading platform

Breedr, a U.K. startup that wants to help farmers make better use of their livestock data to improve profitability, has raised £2.2 million in funding.

The seed round is led by London-based LocalGlobe, with participation from Mons Investment and a number of angel investors. They include Ian Hogarth, Darren Shapland, and Jonathan McKay. The company is previously backed by Forward Partners and Gumtree founder Michael Pennington, which both followed on.

Founded in early 2018 by Ian Wheal and later joined by co-founder Claire Lewis — both of whom grew up on a farm — Breedr aims to bring the livestock industry into the digital age. The company provides farmers with an app to lets them capture data on their livestock and then use that data to improve the efficiency of their farms and help ensure that they can sell the animals at the most optimum time and price.

This ranges from understanding which sires result in the most profitable offspring, to predicting the date of peak profit for each animal. More broadly, Breedr says that farmers using the app can benefit from a “measurable increase in profitability,” while also reducing the environmental impact and waste caused by overfeeding or poor breeding decisions.

“The current market for livestock operates the same way it has for centuries,” Wheal tells TechCrunch. “Most trading is completed with manual processes and at the last minute, with very little visibility for retailers, processors and buyers up and down the supply chain”.

This lack of visibility generates two main problems within the industry. The first is that too much guesswork leads to a mismatch in supply and demand. Unlike industries that use “just in time” manufacturing, Wheal says that in some parts of the world processors do not know on a Friday if enough animals will be available the following Monday.

The second problem is that farmers aren’t able to accurately buy, grow and sell animals on the metrics that drive the most value for their farms. By analysing profitability of individual animals, Breedr has already been able to demonstrate that the top 20 percent of profit is often wiped out by the bottom 20 percent of poor performing animals.

Linked to the startup’s data play is the Breedr marketplace, which uses the same livestock data to improve traceability and help farmers sell their livestock to meat processors and retailers. It is also ultimately where the startup will generate revenue by charging a small transaction fee and potentially up selling other financial products in the future, such as insurance or financing.

“Our data and trading platform is moving the industry from trading on how things look to the actual data that drives commercial return to the industry,” adds Wheal. “[We enable] farmers to utilise data to differentiate their livestock to customer requirements rather than seed the market as a commodity. Suppliers can for the first time have visibility of supply to buy animals at specification, and retailers can plan promotions and build premium brands based on a trusted supply chain”.

Meanwhile, in addition to the company’s seed round, Breedr has been given a grant from Innovate UK, the U.K.’s innovation agency, to lead a consortium developing a “Smart Contracts” system for the meat and livestock sector. Working with farming groups, Imperial College London, and Dunbia (one of Europe’s largest processors of red meat), it plans to use blockchain or distributed ledger technology (DLT) to capture the flows of data and transactions between multiple parties within the livestock industry.